Evaluation Q1

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products? (i.e. of music magazines)

My chosen genre was Hip-hop/Rap initially. As the magazine planning went on I realised that I seemed to be keeping to solely rap rather than hip-hop however, my conventions do include both genres of music. My colour scheme was Red, black and white which I thought were appropriate colours for such a genre as colours like yellow or pink are deemed as more ‘pop’ colours and more ‘girly’ as it were. Rap magazine conventions seem to be more predominantly for the male genre however they do incorporate features that include both ultimately. Conventionally, rap magazines target a male audience (e.g. Vibe Magazine) and seem to feature more male artists. The artists usually featured in the magazines adopt serious facial expressions connoting a sense of confidence and almost aggression. The sense of presence is accentuated by a low angle and the representation of my cover model.

However, in my double page spread, I explore a new side of my star image which is laughter. The rap artists don’t usually smile and show teeth as this may show vulnerability and soften the serious image rap artists usually give out to their audience on their magazines. As you can see above, the vibe magazine cover with Eminem actually sticks to my chosen colour scheme that I had chosen which was a good template for me to use. Quite a lot of the rap magazines involve the colour scheme red, black and white; therefore it was easy to follow that convention when applying conventions to my magazine.

When doing my contents page, I followed the main conventions of these Empire contents pages. I liked the fact that the contents was simple and wasn’t crammed with pages and pages of information. I was looking for something like this as I wasn’t feeling a ‘jam-packed’ contents page, just a simple page displaying brief information of what is to happen in my magazine.

I used the convention of putting the page number large, caption of the page in red and additional info of the page in a smaller black font. I developed the conventions of this magazine by using this page to create more media attention for my magazine as a whole. I did this by displaying Twitter and Facebook links at the bottom left corner of my page, this would develop the convention by also persuading and reminding audiences of how to find out more information of my magazine.

I challenged the forms of convention by adding certain features to my magazine for my own benefit. The ‘Features’ section on my magazine and the ‘RAP-iD talks to MAMMI-C’ on my two page spread was a major challenge that I decided to do, which eventually became a success. I also challenged my colour scheme convention by incorporating the colour grey into my black, red and white colour scheme on my front cover. This worked better than planned therefore I decided to keep it. However I stuck to it more carefully on my contents and two page spread.